"Possibilities"

 

The night before she was scheduled to perform what was probably her twentieth gastric resection, Dr. Bennett dropped three eggs. She had intended to boil an egg for her dinner, but each time she removed one from the package, it slipped free of her fingers, as if it were perfectly natural for that to happen whenever someone took an egg from the fridge. She studied the hands she saw cleaning the yolk from the tiles and tried to imagine that they belonged to someone else.

Mr. Hart's gastric resection went fine. After the procedure, however, Dr. Bennett took her lunch at a nearby park. There she watched an elderly woman in mismatched clothes throw bread crusts to the ducks. She wished she could catch a better glimpse of the old woman's hands. She wondered if the woman was happy, feeding the ducks like that, but knew it was better not to ask.